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Comment by nvk | Hacker News Reader

You could say it's much worst to dig gold out of the ground. (even accounting for the percentage for industrial use)

But at least gold isn't designed to make you waste as much energy as you can to secure its value. Instead, Bitcoin (and every other proof of work cryptocurrency) is based exactly on this principle.

Precisely. Bitcoin is, by design, a Red Queen's race -- miners are incentivised to spend more energy on mining, but the total reward available to miners is fixed.

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

That's the common response to the energy question, but Expedia doesn't take gold. They do take Visa, and they do take Bitcoin, so let's compare those.

Could you clarify how you are making the comparison?

I understand you are talking about the energy cost and other environmental impacts of gold mining, I just don't see how you are determining the present day value of the utility that each thing provides to humanity.

We haven't used a gold-backed currency since the end of Bretton Woods in 1972.

Date nits: The US dollar stopped being based on gold in 1971 when conversions from the dollar to gold were stopped by Nixon. The formal repeal of Bretton Woods then occurred in 1976, and the rest of the industrialized world transitioned to fiat-based currencies around that time as well.

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